Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 22, 2025
"I spend half my time chasing back and forth, but I can't do much. They hold my men until they have robbed them, and then if they show fight they chuck them into the river. It's the same with the flatboat men." He turned, as he continued, to indicate two particularly wretched specimens. "These fellows were drugged and robbed of every dollar they brought here before they got to work at all."
A dark, bobbing object showed, vanished, showed again to enlarge to take the shape of a big flatboat and then it rode the swift, choppy current out of the lower end of the rapid. Nas Ta Bega began to make violent motions, and Shefford, taking his cue, frantically waved his red scarf.
"March with me to the parlor, open the front door just a crack, and, when the Vigilants come up, say to them that we three men have escaped from the house, stolen a flatboat, and started to row across the Tennessee River. Send them away and shut the door. I will be standing near you, behind the door, with my pistol leveled at your head.
Adventurers were dropping down the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim.
As I stood there, gripping the rail, half fearful lest we strike, the furnace doors below were suddenly flung open for a fresh feeding of the fire, and the red glare of the fire lit up the scene. Close in against the shore nestled a flatboat, evidently tied up for the night, and I had a swift glimpse as we shot by of a startled man waving his arms, and behind him a wildly barking dog.
I promised faithfully to pay for that cargo of salt to-day, so that it would be on the river bank ready for loading when the flatboat comes to-morrow. The owner of the boat sent the money yesterday. I've got it here in my pocket. And the salt was to be delivered for cash; it will not be sent till it is paid for." He paused a moment in troubled thought. "David! Call that boy.
Such was the gorgeous dream, the cloud-vision, the unuttered soliloquy of Aaron Burr, the political bankrupt, as he sat smoking on the deck of a flatboat, drifting down the devious current of the Ohio. The boat had reached a point a few miles above Marietta, when an incident occurred to interrupt the resumed dialogue on the Spanish question.
The flatboat had shipped about two inches of water, and more was entering just as fast as it could flow through the cracks. "But it's a boat," Tom repeated. "And she'll be a boat until she sinks and then I'm a swimmer."
Two decades had passed since the Clermont had been launched on the Hudson by Robert Fulton, and steamboats were now carrying cargoes successfully against the swift currents up the Mississippi from New Orleans and were threatening the extinction of the aggressive flatboat traffic. Great strides had also been made in the construction of turnpike roads.
It would go no higher than our knees, and the sound which the regiment made in marching was like that of a great flatboat going against the current. It had been a sad, lavender-colored day, and now that the gloom of the night was setting in, and not so much as a hummock showed itself above the surface, the Creoles began to murmur. And small wonder!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking